I’m not eating at Chick-Fil-A today.

Ok, to be fair the closest Chick-Fil-A to me is over 75 miles away in New Jersey, so I probably wouldn’t be eating there anyway.

But even if there was a Chick-Fil-A near me I wouldn’t eat there today.

Don’t get me wrong.

I love Chick-Fil-A.

I mean, I really love it and not just because I love their chicken and waffle fries. You see, there’s a bit of a family connection.

My great-grandmother had a neighbor many years ago.

His name was Truett Cathy.

At the time, Mr. Cathy was working on a recipe for a chicken sandwich. My great-grandmother, like many great-grandmothers, was a pretty good cook. So, Mr. Cathy would bring over the various incarnations over to her house for her to taste.

Now, I’m sure that she never gave him much feedback on the sandwich beyond “this tastes good” or “you may want to go back to the drawing board.” She never claimed otherwise. But there was one thing she was pretty vehement about telling Mr. Cathy.

My great-grandmother was a devote Christian woman. So, she took it upon herself to remind Mr. Cathy that being a man of God he better make sure his new restaurant was closed on Sundays. Once again, I’m sure he probably had plans of doing that anyway, but now, every time I drive by a Chick-Fil-A on a Sunday morning and I get a craving for a chicken biscuit only to discover the place closed, I think of my great-grandmother Bonnie and wished she had just kept her mouth shut.

Seriously, though, Chick-Fil-A has always held a special place in my heart.

However, I can’t get behind the so-called “Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day.” It’s not because I’m boycotting the restaurant. Honestly, I’m still confused about the response to Dan Cathy’s statements. Regardless of whether or not you agree with them, how are his conservative Christian views news?

Regardless, for me, dedicating a day to shove a chicken sandwich in the face of your “enemies” just doesn’t seem like a very Jesus-like thing to do.

I’m not saying that people don’t have a right to be upset at the outrage over Cathy’s comments. They do, just like their opponents have the right to be outraged by Cathy’s comments and respond accordingly.

But if love for Jesus is at the heart of this “appreciation day”, which I think that is the case, then the church’s response to their perceived persecution should be more like Jesus’ responses when he was persecuted or when he saw others persecuted.

He ate with them, talked peaceably with them, healed them, defended them, and when that didn’t work, he died for them.

For me, “shoving it in their face”just doesn’t seem like the response of the Jesus who said “turn the other cheek.” Even if you disagree vehemently with homosexuality and gay marriage, the response Jesus expects from you towards them and those that would decry your position is clear: love them.

Frankly, Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day just doesn’t seem very loving to me. It seems a lot more like a battle to prove who’s right and who’s wrong.

If you’re a Christian, then that battle over truth has already been fought and won in the death and resurrection of Jesus. He doesn’t need you to refight that battle. He needs you to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

So, while I will eat at Chick-Fil-A again in the future, I won’t eat there today because I don’t want my gay friends to think I’m battling them or shoving anything in their face. I want them to know that I love them, Jesus loves them, and I will be praying for them today as the church yet again forgets what it means to be the Body of Christ.

Grace and peace,

Zack Hunt

Maybe it’s just me, but this music video just makes me smile.

I’d be willing to bet that you can’t watch this video either without at least a grin on your face.

Go ahead.

Give it a try.

You can’t watch this thing an not smile.

It’s true!!

After countless years of searching, Noah’s ark has finally been found by NBC’s Today show!!

Apparently, everyone has been looking in the wrong place. It wasn’t tucked away in the mountains of Turkey. It’s been in the Netherlands all along!

Ok, maybe this isn’t technically the Biblical Noah’s ark, but there is definitely a real ark docked in the Netherlands which claims to be an exact replica based on the dimensions listed in Genesis.

So, if you just can’t wait for Ken Ham to finish his version of Noah’s ark, then pack up the family and head to the Netherlands. Worst case scenario, a trip to the Netherlands would be a lot cooler than a trip to Kentucky.

Just saying.

Found at Christian Nightmares

Well this looks, um, interesting….

Losing his religion: Murphy crafts sci-fi ‘Punk Rock Jesus’

By Brian Truitt, USA Today

His new Vertigo Comics miniseries Punk Rock Jesus imagines a futuristic world of 2019 where the birth of a clone of Jesus Christ is the star of a reality show — called The J2 Project— and, as a teenager complete with Mohawk, rebels against the people and system that created him.

“You think about what would they do if they cloned Jesus? The answer quickly came to me: ‘Oh, they’d turn it into a reality show. They’d make it more interesting for better ratings and basically this thing would turn into a giant Super Bowl every day and would just grab the world’s attention.’ It wrote itself, in a sense,” says Murphy, who writes and illustrates Punk Rock Jesus. (The first issue is out now, and the second is available in comic shops and digitally Aug. 8.)

The book covers 14 years in the life of Chris, who is born out of a modern-day equivalent to the immaculate conception: Pieces of DNA are scraped off the Shroud of Turin, fused with an egg and are inserted into a virgin girl found via nationwide audition.

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This is pretty funny.

I assume these tips are also the actual rules for dating at Bob Jones University.

The really funny thing is, I’m only half kidding about that.

Check out their student handbook and see for yourself. The dating rules start on page 22.

I intentionally don’t give much attention to Westboro Baptist and their nonsense.

However, this counterprotest was too amusing not to share.

I’m not sure what the zombie costumes were meant to represent. Maybe it’s a really subtle nod to the resurrection of the dead?

Yeah, probably not.

Earlier this summer I had the chance to take a group of high school students on a mission trip to England.

While we did many of the “typical” mission trip sorts of things, which were wonderful, the highlight of the trip for me, and many of the students, sort of came out of nowhere.

It happened at a church. Go figure. But not just any church. On our first day of work in Dewsbury, England we had the opportunity to attend mass at the local Church of England minster. This particular church was incredibly old. Christian worship has been held on the site since 627 AD. For those of you counting at home, that’s 1,149 years before the United States was even a country.

That’s old.

While the history of the church was certainly fascinating, what made the service so incredible and the moment so memorable was what happened during communion.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve only ever celebrated the eucharist in one of two ways. Either it was brought to me in the form of those tiny little cups and horrendous cardboard wafers, or I stood in line, waiting my turn to dip the bread, or take a swig from the cup.

In Dewsbury, they did something a little different.

When the time came, rather than having us file up to the front row by row, everyone was invited to circle around the table. From there the priest and his associate took the cup and the bread from person to person while the rest of us in the circle watched and waited for our turn.

Now, I realize this is one of those sorts of things that is hard to convey unless you were there, but the pregnant expectancy and hushed awe of that moment while we were circled around the table was one of the most powerful experiences I have ever had a church. For me, it wasn’t just a group of people eating bread and drinking wine. It was young people standing next to the elderly, the abled bodied alongside the handicapped, Anglicans joined together with Methodists, Americans side by side with Britons, all gathered around the same table, eating from the same bread, drinking from the same cup in a place where people had been doing this very same thing for nearly 1,400 years.

For me, it was one of those transcendent moments where we find ourselves caught up in something bigger than ourselves as we have the privilege of bearing witness to the here and now being momentarily pushed aside to allow us a glimpse of the kingdom of God.

In that moment, I was reminded of just how ancient and enormous the Christian faith really is. My experience at my local church in the States is but a drop in the bucket of a faith that as been lived out nearly unchanged in countless different settings for generations.

These past couple of days as I have had the opportunity to hang out with the monks at Glastonbury Abbey, I have once again been reminded of the enduring quality our ancient faith possesses.

Each morning the monks wake up for vigil at 6:30am to sing the psalms and profess “Glory to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever.” They continue their worship again at lauds, then at mass, then again at vespers, and finally once more at compline. In these acts of worship, along with their daily routine of work, study, and service they incarnate a life of worship and obedience that has been lived out by countless generations for nearly as long as their has been a Christian faith.

For me, like the service in Dewsbury, it has been a profound reminder of just how ancient and enduring the Christian faith really is. Certainly the church has experienced times of renewal, reformation, and even moments of division. But at its heart, Christianity has remained essentially unchanged for 2,000 years.

Yes, styles of worship have evolved. Yes, new traditions have been stared. Yes, new denominations have arisen. But the basic confession of “Jesus is Lord” hasn’t changed.

In a world where everything is constantly changing, where what is revolutionary today, is passe tomorrow, I find the unwavering consistency of the Christian faith to be remarkable as well as a source of both comfort and strength. That steadfastness reminds me that I am not alone in my journey of faith, but rather I am journeying along a path carved out by countless people before me on which I am surrounded by a whole host of other believers both past and present.

As I try to connect that ancient and enduring reality with a modern church in flux, I am forced to pause and question both the necessity as well as the wisdom of the notion that everything in the church must change, lest she be overcome by the march of progress and rendered irrelevant.

I am less convinced everyday that the proclamation of the church’s imminent demise is true.

For 2,000 years the church has witnessed the clash of cultures, revolutions of all kinds, and the rise and fall of great civilizations. Yet, in the wake of this sea of change, she has steadfastly maintained and defiantly pressed on with the same gospel proclaimed by uneducated 1st century fishermen.

Despite countless proclamations of her imminent demise, she has endured.

As the church faces yet another seismic shift in civilization, perhaps we should look back our shared history and remember that what has allowed the church to endure for two millennia has not been her ability to continually change herself, but her ability to continually change us.

Grace and peace,

Zack Hunt

This may not be the worst Christian t-shirt ever, but it’s gotta be close.

“Do the Jew”??

Really???

Nobody thought, “Hey, sexual innuendo and racist overtones probably aren’t the way to go for a Christian t-shirt.”??

Really???

Thanks to Luke for sharing this!

Matt Appling, author of the blog The Church of No People, was kind enough to ask me to write a guest post for him while he’s on his annual blogging sabbatical.

I wrote about the truth that is found in the BIble’s use of metaphors.

Make sure you check it out!

There are no words for this.

Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the show….